Ingredients

$6.5 million

Michael Wu

Rick Singer

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Equipment

Vincent Law, Esq.

Faux-Naïveté

Also seen all over town on this morning’s walk: Political signs. Details of the pitched battle for town council here. One sign – très Garrett Park – features first name only and an allusion to the trains that run through town. Indeed this candidate is a self-professed choochoophile who bought a house near the tracks so he could hear freight being hauled all the time.

… is featured in the New York Times. Hot stuff.

[Michelle] Caetano has been on an alternative work assignment outside the [URI] classroom since the legal process began, URI has said. She moved from NECC to URI in August 2012, according to her attorney, just before the outbreak was discovered. URI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday after the verdict.

So Caetano, now convicted of a felony for her part in writing bogus prescriptions for the drug compounding firm [New England Compounding Center] responsible for the meningitis deaths of 76 people in 2012, remains on the University of Rhode Island faculty. Is she still giving out advice on assessing the behavior of her faculty colleagues?

You can’t make this shit up.

Our school of pharma doth deplore

The racketeering John Kapoor.

We’ve ordered a slurry

Cuz we’re in a hurry

To sandblast his name from the door.

Islamic scholars heard from on the burqa.

Sometimes you stumble on a fact that seems to you to belong not just in the headline of a story, but on the national news. Blasting your head off via one of your several household weapons is already wildly rampant all over Utah; quiet yourself for a moment, reader, and consider how beyond-rampant head-blasting is in the tri-country area…

And of course “depression and suicide aren’t talked about [in the region] because of a fear of having guns taken away.”

Surely the masses of men (most are men) who are doing this to themselves understand at this point that the guns they so anxiously cherish are about suicide and sport, with self-defense a distant third. When (to quote the Beatles), it’s all too much, The Gun is Utahan for Death With Dignity.

“Injuries and accidents, keeping your job, having a job tomorrow. It’s so up and down,” said Val Middleton, a former oil and gas safety instructor at Uintah Basin Technical College in Vernal. “The guys don’t eat right typically. No exercise, hard work, long hours, no sleep. That’s what adds up. The divorce rate is high. Really high. The family life is low.”

Val forgot to add alcohol.

Is this corner of Utah the wave of the future? Can freedom also be thought of as the scope to debrain yourself when you can’t stand it anymore? Says here that shitty life + immediately lethal instrument + sudden moment of hopelessness = suicide. If that’s true – and it seems pretty obviously true for hundreds of thousands of people – and if our culture perceives suicide as a bad thing, a sad thing, a thing we should try to prevent – why aren’t we paying any attention to massively suicidal, gunned-up places like the tri-county area? UD proposes that the hypermasculine culture of autonomy in such places makes suicide both inevitable for many and – in the eyes of many – sort of routine. Sort of okay.

What a great line. I wonder if Hillary came up with it herself. Who cares. Great line.

For every two male athletes afforded the opportunity to destroy neighborhood cars, one female athlete must be afforded the same opportunity.

L.A.’S ELITE ON EDGE!

Take heart. For two reasons.

1.) Johns Hopkins University med school grad Jumana Nagarwala will not, it’s true, be convicted on FGM itself – because a judge concluded the federal law against it is too weakly written. However:

The [Nagarwala] case … isn’t dead without the female genital mutilation charges. The defendants still face conspiracy and obstruction charges that could send them to prison for 20-30 years, if convicted, though more appeals are in the pipeline.

UD takes further comfort in the thought that Nagarwala’s life, with years and years of appeals, and her name entirely besmirched, is as ruined as the lives of the hundred-plus seven-year-old girls her slash-happy ways ruined.

2.) And even with passionate clit-cutting defenders like Alan Dershowitz supporting her, there’s the business of the United States Congress intervening in the whole disgusting mess.

In a move that could revive Detroit’s historic female genital mutilation prosecution, Congress has intervened in the case, saying the Department of Justice gave up too easily on the law that makes the cutting practice illegal.

… “The Trump Administration’s sudden refusal to advance legal arguments to defend a long-standing federal statute criminalizing this horrific act disrespects the health and futures of vulnerable women and girls,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement Wednesday. “Once again, the House is called upon to defend the constitutionality of a duly enacted law and to protect people’s lives.”

The war to keep the United States free of barbaric practices (Dershowitz is also way keen on the mutilation of infant boys’ genitals and woe betide the evil anti-semites who’d try to ban that) is a war, not a battle. Congress will do its part; increasingly strong state laws against FGM will do theirs, etc. The drawn-out appeals process in Michigan will keep Nagarwala’s name and her crimes in the news. We’ll get there.

woke up still wondering how you could

have it in your soul to shoot up a school

this world disgusts me more and more every day

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Almost-daily massacres make precocious poets. This verse (well, a tweet turned into verse by UD) is by a high school friend of one of the injured students at the University of North Carolina Charlotte.

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Putting together the information that’s emerging, it starts to look like this (though again I’m guessing): The guy was a student at the school as recently as this semester, but he withdrew. If a mental health episode prompted the withdrawal, his attack on a classroom full of students (randomly chosen, one assumes) fits the classic angry white male American workplace/school massacre model. Resentment and paranoia engulfed him; if he could no longer be a functional human being/student, he would destroy people who could be.

All of this would make the attack a variant of the Elliot Rodger massacre. In 2014, Rodger, the same age as the latest shooter (22), killed six people near UC Santa Barbara.

Just before driving to [a] sorority house, Rodger uploaded to YouTube a video titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution”, in which he outlined details of his upcoming attack and his motives. He explained that he wanted to punish women for rejecting him and that he envied sexually active men and wanted to punish them for being sexually active.

Maybe today’s maniac has made this be about sexual envy; maybe it’s just about, as I said, homicidal envy of other peoples’ ability to be functional human beings.

… abounds along UD‘s early morning Garrett Park walks. She’s been following one planting in particular (see photograph a few posts below this one) as “the fist of a bud / sprung into petals” begins to do its petaling thing. So here’s a picture of the same peonies twenty-four hours after that first picture.

Two dead, four injured. It happened last night. Not clear from initial reports if the killing is over.

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This says a suspect is in custody.

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Here’s UD‘s guess. Crowds of people were on campus for a concert. A fight broke out and of course guns were all over the place. Just takes one idiot to start the kill.

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Wrong, wrong, wrong. The shooting took place early this evening. And the shooter seems to have been a lone mentally ill person.